Name that Nerd
Everyone knows a nerd or two. Do you know the top nerds in the world, and by top, I mean the people who took visionary nerdiness, elbow grease, and luck and translated it all into billion dollar companies? Below, you will find 15 faces (nine singles, 3 doubles). Most readers will be able to name 3 or 4. Real techies can name 5-10. If you can name more, you are a true guru. All 15? Well, there’s a special place for you. Read more
Social Blade: A Tool That Disects the Front Page of Digg
Have you ever wondered how many diggs it took to get a particular story to the front page of Digg? Are you the type who refreshes often, checks buries, looks at users, monitors the time it takes to get there, checks… everything? If you are a “diggologist,” here’s the perfect tool for you:
Raw Digg data. Just the facts. It keeps track of just about every aspect of all the stories that hit the digg front page. Some of the most important and interesting pieces of data are: number of diggs when it hit, number of recorded buries when it hit, comments when it hit, Diggs per hour, and information about the submitter. All of this data, consolidated on a sortable database-style interface, allows you to filter by users or time period. Read more
Stop Clicking Banners and Maybe They’ll Go Away
Is it you? Are you the one who clicks on the banner ads on social media and social networking sites like Digg, MySpace, Reddit, Facebook, Propeller, and everywhere else (except Mixx, where I haven’t really seen them yet)? I’ve been looking for whoever it is that still thinks they’re the 9,999th visitor or that they really just won a free Xbox 360. When I find this person, I have one word.
Stop.
It’s 2008. Banner advertisements, as wonderful and beautiful as they were before the turn of the millenium, are now worthless. Or are they? They still seem to be on just about every website (this one included, though I don’t know why I bother since nobody clicks on them). I would think that most people, especially the astute, tech-saavy readers of social media and users of social networks, are immune to them and barely register that they’re even there. Read more
Linkjacking is Good, Bad, and Ugly
Linkjacking means different things to different people. Many see it as using the content on one site as the bait to get viewers to pass through your site, or even stay there and explore without going on to the primary content. Most of the time, there will be tidbits or summary information about the primary story accompanied by an interesting image or bit of photoshop magic that takes up most of the page.
To many, including Urban Dictionary, a true “linkjacking” requires that a person from the website doing the linkjacking also submits the story to an aggregator such as Reddit or Digg to drive traffic. I believe that websites and blogs that have a strong enough following to be able to “assume” someone will submit the story are also linkjacking, even if they are not the one’s doing the submitting.
The idea is to generate traffic from social media sites and even the search engines without having to write a ton of original content or do the research. Here is an example of a website that I like a lot, Engadget, which is notorious for linkjacking: Read more
Predictify: Collective Wisdom Fortune Telling
I stumbled upon Predictify recently and the my Social Spider Sense started tingling. “There’s something here, man. There’s something potentially good here.”
Upon joining, reading, examining, and predicting, I soon discovered that the site was loaded with potential. The basic premise is that large groups of people offering their predictions about future events can often offer more accurate looks into the future than small groups of experts. The platform offered at Predictify is designed to harness this power to determine who, what, where, and when. Read more
Rose Demonstrates that New Digg Algo is “Fair and Balanced”
Three weeks into Digg’s promotion algorithm updates, it’s becoming clear that the ‘playing field’ has been leveled. Even the site’s creator appears to be on equal footing. - Decepticrat
It isn’t the first time that a Kevin Rose submitted story failed to hit the front page of Digg, but last week, Kevin did something that he had never done before. He missed the front page. Twice. In a row.
On top of this, his current submission is not faring very well. It still has 12 hours, but is currently at an anemic 32 Diggs after 12 hours — not your standard KR submission number. Read more
Addicted to Stumble juice
This Guest Post Courtesy of Mark Dykeman of Broadcasting Brain Fame
Is SU a Performance Enhancing Drug for Blogs?
The long term impact of using social media to boost your blog readership is frequently debated by social media users. Some people yearn for the server-crashing success of hitting Digg’s front page. Other people seem to prefer the less dramatic, smoother influx of traffic from a site like StumbleUpon. Either way, sometimes it feels like you need a fix of DFP (Digg Front Page) or StumbleJuice in order to keep your stats high. Is that a good thing? I wonder. Read more
What Failed: The Digg Algorithm or the Digg Users?
It took around 600 Diggs to get the story Super Bowl XLII Champions New York Giants promoted to the front page. Are the recent changes in the algorithm the reason? More importantly, is this a case where the algorithm was doing the “right thing” but was overpowered by the sheer bulk of Diggs?
It took 34 minutes for the story to be promoted from upcoming. During that time, the Ajaxonomy Bury Recorder showed it to have 17 buries (which means it had a lot more than that). That could be a reason for it taking so many, but let’s explore further. This is a screenshot of the Upcoming 45 seconds after it hit the front page. Read more
Google Passes Yahoo on Alexa.com for First Time since 2006
Between mid-and late-January, Google’s traffic levels according to Alexa.com passed Yahoo! to become the highest traffic website in the world for the first time, other than two brief spurts in 2006. It comes on the wake of several pieces of news centered around Yahoo!, including Microsoft’s unsolicited offer to buy them and planned layoffs.
Both sites have been hovering around each other in traffic since the beginning of 2006, bouncing regularly between 25% and 30% reach to internet users worldwide. Yahoo! is still listed on the Alexa rankings as #1, but if Google stays put, this will change with the next ranking update. Read more
We Love Subscribers!
